Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Hitting the road

The Beast's first prowl... OK, I'll stop with the "Beast" stuff.

Overnight tonight at Catalina State Park. I spent some time yesterday "moving in" -- pots and pans and dishes and utensils. Towels. Sheets and blankets. A few more items in the toolbox. Checked all the fluids -- still need to find where the power steering fluid reservoir is. It's making that Ford power steering noise I learned to love in the Ford pickup I had for 14 years.

Spent some time researching wifi "hotspots" while I was home waiting for the carpet guys to arrive. If I do indeed hit the road for a week or two at a time, it would be good to have something bigger than my iPhone for staying in touch. And blogging.

What I'm pointing at is using my phone as as that hotspot, sharing its cell data connection via tethering. That lead me to consider changing my service from ATT to T-Mobile. TMO has an interesting business plan. And they'll buy me out of my current ATT contract. Essentially I'd get unlimited data, voice, and text plus 5 gigs of tethered data per month for exactly what I'm now paying ATT.

The issue is coverage: TMO is just ramping up its 4G coverage areas. This feels like ATT when I got my first iPhone. There's a lot of negative talk in the blogosphere about their coverage, but there's also a recognition that they've done a LOT in the last year. I have no loyalty to ATT, but their coverage is now pretty good.

Here we go ...

This is about my travels in a 1999 24-foot class C motorhome, which I sometimes call "the Beast." It's also about projects, renovations, repairs, and plans which occur to me when I'm on the road.

There's a lot of these RV travel blogs out there. I've listed below some of the ones I read regularly. My intention is not so much to publish a travel magazine, but to record where I went and what I did and what I did to the rig and what I'd like to do. Something close to the original meaning of "log." Random thoughts on the general enterprise of RV travel will creep in.